OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SteinDreamer: Variance Reduction for Text-to-3D Score Distillation via Stein Identity
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Score distillation has emerged as one of the most prevalent approaches for text-to-3D asset synthesis. Essentially, score distillation updates 3D parameters by lifting and back-propagating scores averaged over different views. In this paper, we reveal that the gradient estimation in score distillation is inherent to high variance. Through the lens of variance reduction, the effectiveness of SDS and VSD can be interpreted as applications of various control variates to the Monte Carlo estimator of the distilled score. Motivated by this rethinking and based on Stein's identity, we propose a more general solution to reduce variance for score distillation, termed Stein Score Distillation (SSD). SSD incorporates control variates constructed by Stein identity, allowing for arbitrary baseline functions. This enables us to include flexible guidance priors and network architectures to explicitly optimize for variance reduction. In our experiments, the overall pipeline, dubbed SteinDreamer, is implemented by instantiating the control variate with a monocular depth estimator. The results suggest that SSD can effectively reduce the distillation variance and consistently improve visual quality for both object- and scene-level generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that SteinDreamer achieves faster convergence than existing methods due to more stable gradient updates.
GD^2-NeRF: Generative Detail Compensation via GAN and Diffusion for One-shot Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we focus on the One-shot Novel View Synthesis (O-NVS) task which targets synthesizing photo-realistic novel views given only one reference image per scene. Previous One-shot Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields (OG-NeRF) methods solve this task in an inference-time finetuning-free manner, yet suffer the blurry issue due to the encoder-only architecture that highly relies on the limited reference image. On the other hand, recent diffusion-based image-to-3d methods show vivid plausible results via distilling pre-trained 2D diffusion models into a 3D representation, yet require tedious per-scene optimization. Targeting these issues, we propose the GD$^2$-NeRF, a Generative Detail compensation framework via GAN and Diffusion that is both inference-time finetuning-free and with vivid plausible details. In detail, following a coarse-to-fine strategy, GD$^2$-NeRF is mainly composed of a One-stage Parallel Pipeline (OPP) and a 3D-consistent Detail Enhancer (Diff3DE). At the coarse stage, OPP first efficiently inserts the GAN model into the existing OG-NeRF pipeline for primarily relieving the blurry issue with in-distribution priors captured from the training dataset, achieving a good balance between sharpness (LPIPS, FID) and fidelity (PSNR, SSIM). Then, at the fine stage, Diff3DE further leverages the pre-trained image diffusion models to complement rich out-distribution details while maintaining decent 3D consistency. Extensive experiments on both the synthetic and real-world datasets show that GD$^2$-NeRF noticeably improves the details while without per-scene finetuning.
Federated Class-Incremental Learning with New-Class Augmented Self-Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among participants while guaranteeing the privacy of raw data. Mainstream FL methodologies overlook the dynamic nature of real-world data, particularly its tendency to grow in volume and diversify in classes over time. This oversight results in FL methods suffering from catastrophic forgetting, where the trained models inadvertently discard previously learned information upon assimilating new data. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) method, named \underline{Fed}erated \underline{C}lass-Incremental \underline{L}earning with New-Class \underline{A}ugmented \underline{S}elf-Di\underline{S}tillation (FedCLASS). The core of FedCLASS is to enrich the class scores of historical models with new class scores predicted by current models and utilize the combined knowledge for self-distillation, enabling a more sufficient and precise knowledge transfer from historical models to current models. Theoretical analyses demonstrate that FedCLASS stands on reliable foundations, considering scores of old classes predicted by historical models as conditional probabilities in the absence of new classes, and the scores of new classes predicted by current models as the conditional probabilities of class scores derived from historical models. Empirical experiments demonstrate the superiority of FedCLASS over four baseline algorithms in reducing average forgetting rate and boosting global accuracy.
Edge AI as a Service with Coordinated Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

As artificial intelligence (AI) applications continue to expand in next-generation networks, there is a growing need for deep neural network (DNN) models. Although DNN models deployed at the edge are promising for providing AI as a service with low latency, their cooperation is yet to be explored. In this paper, we consider that DNN service providers share their computing resources as well as their models' parameters and allow other DNNs to offload their computations without mirroring. We propose a novel algorithm called coordinated DNNs on edge (\textbf{CoDE}) that facilitates coordination among DNN services by establishing new inference paths. CoDE aims to find the optimal path, which is the path with the highest possible reward, by creating multi-task DNNs from individual models. The reward reflects the inference throughput and model accuracy. With CoDE, DNN models can make new paths for inference by using their own or other models' parameters. We then evaluate the performance of CoDE through numerical experiments. The results demonstrate a $40\%$ increase in the inference throughput while degrading the average accuracy by only $2.3\%$. Experiments show that CoDE enhances the inference throughput and, achieves higher precision compared to a state-of-the-art existing method.
On Discprecncies between Perturbation Evaluations of Graph Neural Network Attributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks are increasingly finding their way into the realm of graphs and modeling relationships between features. Concurrently graph neural network explanation approaches are being invented to uncover relationships between the nodes of the graphs. However, there is a disparity between the existing attribution methods, and it is unclear which attribution to trust. Therefore research has introduced evaluation experiments that assess them from different perspectives. In this work, we assess attribution methods from a perspective not previously explored in the graph domain: retraining. The core idea is to retrain the network on important (or not important) relationships as identified by the attributions and evaluate how networks can generalize based on these relationships. We reformulate the retraining framework to sidestep issues lurking in the previous formulation and propose guidelines for correct analysis. We run our analysis on four state-of-the-art GNN attribution methods and five synthetic and real-world graph classification datasets. The analysis reveals that attributions perform variably depending on the dataset and the network. Most importantly, we observe that the famous GNNExplainer performs similarly to an arbitrary designation of edge importance. The study concludes that the retraining evaluation cannot be used as a generalized benchmark and recommends it as a toolset to evaluate attributions on a specifically addressed network, dataset, and sparsity.
Geometry Depth Consistency in RGBD Relative Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Relative pose estimation for RGBD cameras is crucial in a number of applications. Previous approaches either rely on the RGB aspect of the images to estimate pose thus not fully making use of depth in the estimation process or estimate pose from the 3D cloud of points that each image produces, thus not making full use of RGB information. This paper shows that if one pair of correspondences is hypothesized from the RGB-based ranked-ordered correspondence list, then the space of remaining correspondences is restricted to corresponding pairs of curves nested around the hypothesized correspondence, implicitly capturing depth consistency. This simple Geometric Depth Constraint (GDC) significantly reduces potential matches. In effect this becomes a filter on possible correspondences that helps reduce the number of outliers and thus expedites RANSAC significantly. As such, the same budget of time allows for more RANSAC iterations and therefore additional robustness and a significant speedup. In addition, the paper proposed a Nested RANSAC approach that also speeds up the process, as shown through experiments on TUM, ICL-NUIM, and RGBD Scenes v2 datasets.
DEWP: Deep Expansion Learning for Wind Power Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Wind is one kind of high-efficient, environmentally-friendly and cost-effective energy source. Wind power, as one of the largest renewable energy in the world, has been playing a more and more important role in supplying electricity. Though growing dramatically in recent years, the amount of generated wind power can be directly or latently affected by multiple uncertain factors, such as wind speed, wind direction, temperatures, etc. More importantly, there exist very complicated dependencies of the generated power on the latent composition of these multiple time-evolving variables, which are always ignored by existing works and thus largely hinder the prediction performances. To this end, we propose DEWP, a novel Deep Expansion learning for Wind Power forecasting framework to carefully model the complicated dependencies with adequate expressiveness. DEWP starts with a stack-by-stack architecture, where each stack is composed of (i) a variable expansion block that makes use of convolutional layers to capture dependencies among multiple variables; (ii) a time expansion block that applies Fourier series and backcast/forecast mechanism to learn temporal dependencies in sequential patterns. These two tailored blocks expand raw inputs into different latent feature spaces which can model different levels of dependencies of time-evolving sequential data. Moreover, we propose an inference block corresponding for each stack, which applies multi-head self-attentions to acquire attentive features and maps expanded latent representations into generated wind power. In addition, to make DEWP more expressive in handling deep neural architectures, we adapt doubly residue learning to process stack-by-stack outputs. Finally, we present extensive experiments in the real-world wind power forecasting application on two datasets from two different turbines to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Large language model for Bible sentiment analysis: Sermon on the Mount
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The revolution of natural language processing via large language models has motivated its use in multidisciplinary areas that include social sciences and humanities and more specifically, comparative religion. Sentiment analysis provides a mechanism to study the emotions expressed in text. Recently, sentiment analysis has been used to study and compare translations of the Bhagavad Gita, which is a fundamental and sacred Hindu text. In this study, we use sentiment analysis for studying selected chapters of the Bible. These chapters are known as the Sermon on the Mount. We utilize a pre-trained language model for sentiment analysis by reviewing five translations of the Sermon on the Mount, which include the King James version, the New International Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the Lamsa Version, and the Basic English Version. We provide a chapter-by-chapter and verse-by-verse comparison using sentiment and semantic analysis and review the major sentiments expressed. Our results highlight the varying sentiments across the chapters and verses. We found that the vocabulary of the respective translations is significantly different. We detected different levels of humour, optimism, and empathy in the respective chapters that were used by Jesus to deliver his message.
Parallel Integer Sort: Theory and Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Integer sorting is a fundamental problem in computer science. This paper studies parallel integer sort both in theory and in practice. In theory, we show tighter bounds for a class of existing practical integer sort algorithms, which provides a solid theoretical foundation for their widespread usage in practice and strong performance. In practice, we design a new integer sorting algorithm, \textsf{DovetailSort}, that is theoretically-efficient and has good practical performance. In particular, \textsf{DovetailSort} overcomes a common challenge in existing parallel integer sorting algorithms, which is the difficulty of detecting and taking advantage of duplicate keys. The key insight in \textsf{DovetailSort} is to combine algorithmic ideas from both integer- and comparison-sorting algorithms. In our experiments, \textsf{DovetailSort} achieves competitive or better performance than existing state-of-the-art parallel integer and comparison sorting algorithms on various synthetic and real-world datasets.
Graph Neural Networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems: Advances, Applications and Trends
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is crucial for improving traffic congestion, reducing accidents, optimizing urban planning, and more. However, the complexity of traffic networks has rendered traditional machine learning and statistical methods less effective. With the advent of artificial intelligence, deep learning frameworks have achieved remarkable progress across various fields and are now considered highly effective in many areas. Since 2019, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a particularly promising deep learning approach within the ITS domain, owing to their robust ability to model graph-structured data and address complex problems. Consequently, there has been increasing scholarly attention to the applications of GNNs in transportation, which have demonstrated excellent performance. Nevertheless, current research predominantly focuses on traffic forecasting, with other ITS domains, such as autonomous vehicles and demand prediction, receiving less attention. This paper aims to review the applications of GNNs across six representative and emerging ITS research areas: traffic forecasting, vehicle control system, traffic signal control, transportation safety, demand prediction, and parking management. We have examined a wide range of graph-related studies from 2018 to 2023, summarizing their methodologies, features, and contributions in detailed tables and lists. Additionally, we identify the challenges of applying GNNs in ITS and propose potential future research directions.
MPRE: Multi-perspective Patient Representation Extractor for Disease Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Patient representation learning based on electronic health records (EHR) is a critical task for disease prediction. This task aims to effectively extract useful information on dynamic features. Although various existing works have achieved remarkable progress, the model performance can be further improved by fully extracting the trends, variations, and the correlation between the trends and variations in dynamic features. In addition, sparse visit records limit the performance of deep learning models. To address these issues, we propose the Multi-perspective Patient Representation Extractor (MPRE) for disease prediction. Specifically, we propose Frequency Transformation Module (FTM) to extract the trend and variation information of dynamic features in the time-frequency domain, which can enhance the feature representation. In the 2D Multi-Extraction Network (2D MEN), we form the 2D temporal tensor based on trend and variation. Then, the correlations between trend and variation are captured by the proposed dilated operation. Moreover, we propose the First-Order Difference Attention Mechanism (FODAM) to calculate the contributions of differences in adjacent variations to the disease diagnosis adaptively. To evaluate the performance of MPRE and baseline methods, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world public datasets. The experiment results show that MPRE outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of AUROC and AUPRC.
Privacy-Preserving Data in IoT-based Cloud Systems: A Comprehensive Survey with AI Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

As the integration of Internet of Things devices with cloud computing proliferates, the paramount importance of privacy preservation comes to the forefront. This survey paper meticulously explores the landscape of privacy issues in the dynamic intersection of IoT and cloud systems. The comprehensive literature review synthesizes existing research, illuminating key challenges and discerning emerging trends in privacy preserving techniques. The categorization of diverse approaches unveils a nuanced understanding of encryption techniques, anonymization strategies, access control mechanisms, and the burgeoning integration of artificial intelligence. Notable trends include the infusion of machine learning for dynamic anonymization, homomorphic encryption for secure computation, and AI-driven access control systems. The culmination of this survey contributes a holistic view, laying the groundwork for understanding the multifaceted strategies employed in securing sensitive data within IoT-based cloud environments. The insights garnered from this survey provide a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers navigating the complex terrain of privacy preservation in the evolving landscape of IoT and cloud computing
A review on different techniques used to combat the non-IID and heterogeneous nature of data in FL
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine-learning approach enabling collaborative model training across multiple decentralized edge devices that hold local data samples, all without exchanging these samples. This collaborative process occurs under the supervision of a central server orchestrating the training or via a peer-to-peer network. The significance of FL is particularly pronounced in industries such as healthcare and finance, where data privacy holds paramount importance. However, training a model under the Federated learning setting brings forth several challenges, with one of the most prominent being the heterogeneity of data distribution among the edge devices. The data is typically non-independently and non-identically distributed (non-IID), thereby presenting challenges to model convergence. This report delves into the issues arising from non-IID and heterogeneous data and explores current algorithms designed to address these challenges.
ConfusionPrompt: Practical Private Inference for Online Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are typically deployed as online services, requiring users to transmit detailed prompts to cloud servers. This raises significant privacy concerns. In response, we introduce ConfusionPrompt, a novel framework for private LLM inference that protects user privacy by: (i) decomposing the original prompt into smaller sub-prompts, and (ii) generating pseudo-prompts alongside the genuine sub-prompts, which are then sent to the LLM. The server responses are later recomposed by the user to reconstruct the final output. This approach offers key advantages over previous LLM privacy protection methods: (i) it integrates seamlessly with existing black-box LLMs, and (ii) it delivers a significantly improved privacy-utility trade-off compared to existing text perturbation methods. We also develop a $(λ, μ, ρ)$-privacy model to formulate the requirements for a privacy-preserving group of prompts and provide a complexity analysis to justify the role of prompt decomposition. Our empirical evaluation shows that ConfusionPrompt achieves significantly higher utility than local inference methods using open-source models and perturbation-based techniques, while also reducing memory consumption compared to open-source LLMs.
Skeleton2vec: A Self-supervised Learning Framework with Contextualized Target Representations for Skeleton Sequence
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Self-supervised pre-training paradigms have been extensively explored in the field of skeleton-based action recognition. In particular, methods based on masked prediction have pushed the performance of pre-training to a new height. However, these methods take low-level features, such as raw joint coordinates or temporal motion, as prediction targets for the masked regions, which is suboptimal. In this paper, we show that using high-level contextualized features as prediction targets can achieve superior performance. Specifically, we propose Skeleton2vec, a simple and efficient self-supervised 3D action representation learning framework, which utilizes a transformer-based teacher encoder taking unmasked training samples as input to create latent contextualized representations as prediction targets. Benefiting from the self-attention mechanism, the latent representations generated by the teacher encoder can incorporate the global context of the entire training samples, leading to a richer training task. Additionally, considering the high temporal correlations in skeleton sequences, we propose a motion-aware tube masking strategy which divides the skeleton sequence into several tubes and performs persistent masking within each tube based on motion priors, thus forcing the model to build long-range spatio-temporal connections and focus on action-semantic richer regions. Extensive experiments on NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that our proposed Skeleton2vec outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art results.
Free-form Shape Modeling in XR: A Systematic Review
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Shape modeling research in Computer Graphics has been an active area for decades. The ability to create and edit complex 3D shapes has been of key importance in Computer-Aided Design, Animation, Architecture, and Entertainment. With the growing popularity of Virtual and Augmented Reality, new applications and tools have been developed for artistic content creation; real-time interactive shape modeling has become increasingly important for a continuum of virtual and augmented reality environments (eXtended Reality (XR)). Shape modeling in XR opens new possibilities for intuitive design and shape modeling in an accessible way. Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches generating shape information from text prompts are set to change how artists create and edit 3D models. There has been a substantial body of research on interactive 3D shape modeling. However, there is no recent extensive review of the existing techniques and what AI shape generation means for shape modeling in interactive XR environments. In this state-of-the-art paper, we fill this research gap in the literature by surveying free-form shape modeling work in XR, with a focus on sculpting and 3D sketching, the most intuitive forms of free-form shape modeling. We classify and discuss these works across five dimensions: contribution of the articles, domain setting, interaction tool, auto-completion, and collaborative designing. The paper concludes by discussing the disconnect between interactive 3D sculpting and sketching and how this will likely evolve with the prevalence of AI shape-generation tools in the future.